sutton050

I'm continuing to have my issues with Virgin Media, let me explain.  Last month I came to them asking to remove the superfluous junk offering items, as I was simply paying more for items I didn't use, want nor need. They could not help, in fact they flat refused to, so I cancelled 66% of my services off completely, TV, Phone all gone and never ever to return - well done them... The next item was the 200mbit broadband I was paying for, below is a historic speed test I carried out a lot, as you can see I never, ever, got near 200Mbit, but I always got over 50Mbit... Being quite a logical person therefore, and based on this evidence, this proof I had for myself, I downgraded the internet from the Vivid200 to Vivid50, i.e. 50mbit... Yeah, save money, it can do 50 mbit easy, right... Right... RIGHT?..... WRONG. This is tonight's speed test... Last night it was slower than that, I had a download speed of 1.22mbit, and upload of 620K. Yeah, rocking the 1990's internet speed. A...

Yeah, I'm serious, I've taken time tonight to look at the release of Ubuntu Server 17.04, specifically to set up a new mini-server which is to be Core 2 Duo powered and on 24/7 as boot strapper & service strapping server itself. But, before I run I like to walk, so I set up a 2 core, 1GB RAM VMware machine from the 17.04 ISO... Take a look at the first thing it has presented to me.... Yes, just read that again... I booted the server... and the only action I took was to log in... Welcome to 17.04... All good... What wait?.. Why am I being warned to upgrade my 12.04?  This is 17.04? Before I ran around like my last vestiges of hair were on fire, I decided to do a simple test, I've previously found that Ubuntu often goes wondering off on the internet for message of the day (motd) information, so I pulled the network card (virtual) out of the machine. This results in a long boot time, but you at least know no remote files or services are going to be listing things on your s...

As a systems admin, or dev ops, or whatever your job title might be, never ever assume that the person you're handing a system to has a clue.  This might seem harsh, but it's true, and proves itself true time and time again. "Assumption is the mother of all f**k ups" About a year ago I deployed a system which automatically sent requests to remote machines (via SMS) getting those machines to report their status or send back error information, but also to gather some basic information. It has run happily for a whole year, it has been all pretty plain sailing, the hours and hours of work I put into it, to automate it and keep it self-sustained have paid off, zero faults, zero down time, self-regulation is the way forward for me; even if it took slightly longer to put the system in place, it has needed no human input for nearing a year! However, the unit needed to move, about a week ago, it needed be physically picked up and taken out of my small server room and into the ...

How robust is your back up solution?  Go on, be honest with yourself, how good is it?... Because I've seen a whole host of them and, at this very moment, this is the screen up on one of my servers.... Yes, my raid 5, just a test raid 5 with three really bad recycled SAS drives in it has failed; this doesn't surprise me, but it does delay me because I now have to rebuild the data... However, I know my data is good.... Lets see how good my back up is. This back up is coming from a DD created raw image of the virtual disk, stored to and soon lifted from my NFS accessible ZFS mirrored back up server. Therefore you would be right to ask, why are you rebuilding the virtual RAID disk in the above screen shot?  Well, I'm going to test my back up strategy! I popped the known bad disk and the good disks out, replaced all three and I'm able to test a restore to a new virtual disk set, I have a USB boot drive ready, this is a test. This kind of test, a real live restore, is sorely ...